


'Fun' With Migraines

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2019 [2]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Academy phase, Fictober 2019, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Headcanon Autistic Byleth, Headcanon Autistic Character, References to Family Death, references to death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-11-23 20:50:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20895914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Seteth really did not expect that the way he ran into her most often would be waiting outside the infirmary door. [Written for Fictober 2019]





	'Fun' With Migraines

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fictober 2019, prompt “Yes, I admit it, you were right.”

Many things about him had changed over the years (more things than nearly anyone was likely to guess), but some things had remained the same. Seteth would have thought that he would have been able to use the time to excise all of his bad habits, but some had, unfortunately, persisted.

The first week of the new school year was always the worst in terms of the workload. The paperwork would grow from a few sheets of paper to a mountain of the parchment the monastery used for permanent documents and external correspondence as soon as you turned around. There was so much that had to be dealt with in regards to medical accommodations, approving new donations to the library, meeting with the appropriate committees to make adjustments to the new budgets, and other minutia that found their way to his desk and refused to leave.

Parents could present a problem as well. When Seteth had first joined Rhea at the monastery, she had complained privately about how difficult it was to convince Fódlan at large that the Officers’ Academy should be a school for every student who have proven worthy of entry, not just the nobility. The nobility was, she felt, entirely too convinced of their own superiority. Seteth had soon discovered that, for all that Rhea was unhappy with the state of affairs as it was, she had not actually taken any steps to implement the changes she wished to see take place. Oh, well. As Seteth recalled, the small picture had never been her strong suit. Rhea strengths lied in working on a larger scale. He could patch up the holes in the smaller picture; it was the least he could do.

The work to make the study materials for the entrance exams more easily accessible to commoners was… ongoing. Progress moved more slowly than his cohorts in these efforts would have liked, but patience was needed. Give it a few decades, and things would be more equitable.

And perhaps, in a few decades, the parents of noble students would be more accepting of the changes Seteth was trying to bring about. But while endless pessimism was offensive to the goddess (and he had a few tales he could tell about just _how _offensive she found it, though these were tales best never shared), there wasn’t much reason for optimism, especially not when every complaining letter he received reprised the same three topics.

Noble parents objected not only to the idea that their precious children might not only have a dormitory next to one of the “riff-raff,” but that their dormitory room was even in the same building as those of the riff-raff. The parents of young women attending were especially strident; did Seteth not _understand _how easily these girls’ virtue might be compromised by sleeping in close quarters with young men with no sense of propriety or even decency?

Noble parents protested the reality that their precious children were made to sit down and eat at the same tables as the riff-raff. Surely, there was a danger that they would pick up the boorish table manners of their fellows; how long would it be before they were eating off of the floor?

Noble parents were up in arms over the idea that their precious children would learn in the same classrooms as the riff-raff, for surely their education would suffer if the curriculum was tailored to poorly-educated, inherently less intelligent commoners. Surely.

And surely, if any of them had ever cared to air their grievances to Seteth’s _face_, they would have received a scolding of a caliber incapable of being captured by the written word. No matter how he had tried. (Goddess knew how he had tried.)

The worst part of it was that, for the most part, their children were cut from a considerably more decent cloth, and seemed eager for a more diverse environment than the one they had enjoyed at home. It did give Seteth a few ideas for a new fable; perhaps, once he had written it, he would simply send a copy of the fable in response to any such letter he received.

That…

That was not going to work. Seteth foresaw a boom in the use of paper as kindling. It was a nice thought, though.

This year’s crop of students was presenting its own problems, even without taking the parents into account.

Disciplinary problems were thankfully rare, at least they had been so far—and the year had just begun. Caspar von Bergliez had been reported for roughhousing outside of the appropriate contexts, though this was mercifully something that fell under his professor’s purview. Lorenz and Sylvain’s treatment of seemingly every woman they came across, on the other hand, was eventually something Seteth himself was going to have to address. The fact that they were already doing… what it was they were doing when it was still the first week of the school year, so boldly and so openly, with no apparent fear of repercussions, made him decidedly pessimistic as to how likely it was that their professors would be able to curb their behavior in any real sense. (This was not Seteth’s first time dealing with such students. He did not look forward to dealing with it again. Especially Sylvain—that boy had a _reputation_, and it was one that had seen Seteth dreading the day he eventually found his way to Garreg Mach for the past couple of years now. The fact that Flayn had awoken and was here now, still adjusting to life in the modern era, only compounded his dread.)

Beyond that, there were the security concerns raised by having the heirs to all three of the sovereign territories enrolled at the same time. Edelgard’s siblings had all gone missing years ago, during the chaos of the overthrow that saw Emperor Ionius utterly stripped of any real power. The question of what had happened to her brothers and sisters was one that, to this day, had no clear answer; their bodies had never surfaced, and the fates of their mothers was similarly murky. To have her go missing or be hurt in any way would have caused an uproar. Dimitri was one of the few members of House Blaiddyd left living; it would have created a similar uproar for him to come to any real harm. House Riegan was in decline, most of its members also dead or missing, and while the Alliance was prepared to elevate another house to leadership if House Riegan ever went extinct, it would not do to allow Claude to come to harm, either. As unsure as Seteth was of Jeralt’s good character, it was something of a blessing that the man had resurfaced when he had; his current troop of mercenaries had been hired on to act as extra security almost immediately.

Then, there were the truly _bizarre _circumstances behind Bernadetta von Varley’s arrival at the monastery; Seteth wouldn’t have believed it, except he had actually been present when she had been tipped out of that sack. All attempts to contact her parents had thus far been met with silence that, as far as Seteth was concerned, grew more damning with each passing day. (The more he dug into what they knew about House Varley, the more concerned he was that he might have to approach her with the appropriate paperwork to petition for sanctuary. It wasn’t often that the monastery received students in such circumstances as to warrant sanctuary, either to the Officers Academy or the various trade schools for children in the surrounding towns and villages, but Bernadetta might well qualify.)

There was the large donation Margrave Edmund had made when his daughter was accepted to the Academy, and the worryingly specific request that had accompanied it. There were the rumblings coming from Lord Lonato’s territory, and the question of just what to do with his adopted son if those rumblings ever morphed into something more tangible. Rhea’s ideas on that score were very different from Seteth’s. They were still trying to reach a compromise.

Flayn had awoken. This was its own joy, and its own frustration, when he had such little time to spend with her.

Even in normal years, the first week of the school year was a stressful time. _This _year had introduced stressors beyond any Seteth had become accustomed to since he had taken on this role, and to accompany those stressors, there was an enormous amount of work that needed to be done. He could not neglect it. Beyond the fact that the work would just grow more daunting the more he ignored it, he must always set a good example for the rest to follow. If he was not diligent, it would have been rank hypocrisy to ask as much of the students or faculty.

When Seteth contended with such massive amounts of work, he was wont to ignore all else.

His vision began to narrow and unravel maybe an hour before the pain set in. He knew what it was, of course. He had been on this earth long enough to understand what that meant. A few more forms to fill out; a few more responses to write. He would go to Manuela after he had done that.

Three forms became four, five, six. Two responses to letters became three, four, five.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t notice it when the right side of his head began to throb. _Oh, the right side_, Seteth thought, almost absently. _It is usually the left_. It would have been difficult _not _to notice the throbbing pain that radiated down from his right temple all the way to his neck. The pain spread from his temple to his eye, the bridge of his nose, his jaw, his _teeth_, until it felt as it would feel if the side of his head was starting to rot away. It wasn’t just that he was aware of the pain; it was difficult to be aware of anything that _wasn’t _the pain.

He kept on writing, until—

Snap!

Seteth stared helplessly at the broken quill dangling in two pieces, bound by only a faint fiber, in his hand. Then, he looked down at the letter he had been writing. An official in the Eastern Church was pressing for permission to open a church near Fódlan’s Throat, with the intent of preaching to any Almyrans who happened to come across him there. Seteth’s response had been _meant _to be a reminder that the Church of Seiros did not preach to outsiders. When he, with some difficulty, focused his eyes upon the parchment, he did not recognize what he had written as the response he had meant to communicate. Actually, he didn’t recognize it as language at all.

Alright. _Now _was the time to go see Manuela.

Mercifully, it was hardly a long walk between his office and the infirmary, so that though the lights lit in the lamps mounted on the walls dizzied him, he wouldn’t have long to lurch forward like a drunkard. When Seteth was able to focus his eyes enough to see somewhat clearly, however, it became clear that there was going to be a witness to his lurching.

And it was the person he was certain was going to be the most persistent source of headaches in the year to come. Of course it was.

Truth be told, in spite of the host of objections and questions Seteth had regarding Melusine Eisner, he bore her no ill will on a personal level. She had yet to do anything that could spark his ill will. But the circumstances behind her being appointed to the position she held now set his teeth on edge (so many uncertainties, so many unanswered questions, and none of the people who could have provided answers were proving to be in any way forthcoming), and try as he might, as much as he didn’t like to regard people as problems, that was how he was inclined to regard her. A problem, one that had been put in charge of students, one that wandered the monastery almost constantly in her spare time. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time a problem was mobile. Far from it.

Today, though, she was standing outside of Manuela’s door, silent as she ever was, but holding herself very stiffly, stiffly enough that concern started to push up over the pain and the annoyance of problems and questions.

“Are you injured?” he asked curtly. “If so, you should not wait for Manuela to check out in the hall. You may be waiting for a while.”

They all had their ways of dealing with stress, after all. Manuela’s was… less than ideal. Actually, it wasn’t just less than ideal; it was so far from being ideal that it did not reside on the same continent as the home of what was ideal. She remained impervious to criticism, even years after she had joined the ranks of the faculty, and try as he might, Seteth could not make a provision against drunkenness materialize in the faculty code of conduct where it did not previously exist. As such, certain norms of propriety had often to be ignored when seeking treatment from her.

Melusine started, though she turned her gaze to his face more slowly than Seteth would have expected given the way she had jolted. Actually, he though she had turned her head rather gingerly, though that could be his eyes playing tricks—it wouldn’t be the first time his eyes had started playing tricks on him when he had a migraine.

Her mouth worked, but it was a moment before she replied, “I’m not injured.” Seteth couldn’t tell whether her voice sounded faint, or if she was just speaking somewhat more quietly than usual. “It’s my head…”

Her head.

Come to think of it, Seteth had not spent much time around Melusine, but he didn’t think her face was typically quite that pale.

And judging by what he had managed to learn about Jeralt’s movements since his flight from the monastery, Melusine had likely had little experience of anything like Garreg Mach, or the position she now found herself in.

“I understand that you may find your position a stressful one.” And it was important, always, to remember that however questionable her appointment might have been, it had not been her own idea. (Rhea still wouldn’t explain her reasoning to him, and Seteth was at the point of simply giving up on asking. She had her reasons. He could only hope that those reasons would become apparent to him, in time.) “It will grow less so as you become accustomed to it.”

She… didn’t shake her head, not exactly. She started to shake her head, before wincing, pasty face taking on a faint greenish cast. “Not stress,” Melusine muttered. “This place is—“

The door to the infirmary swung open, and Manuela poked her head out into the hall. “Goodness, why are you two just standing out in the hall?” Her voice was far clearer than it would have been if drunk or hungover, and if there was any alcohol on her breath, Seteth suspected he would have been able to smell it all the way from the audience chamber. “Don’t just stand there, come in; I haven’t got all day.”

Well, any invitation was better than no invitation.

It wasn’t until after he had returned to his office, the pain beginning to subside, that Seteth realized that Melusine had never answered his question.

-0-0-0-

The Blue Sea Moon was…

It was.

Seteth had spent many long years in seclusion, with little news of the outside world beyond what Rhea relayed to him. The Blue Sea Moon carried nothing with it he wished to remember. (He had not been in Zanado. He had quit that place many years prior for Enbarr, to the grief and anger of those to whom he could never now make amends.) If it had been up to him, he would have passed the month by in quiet contemplation, and spent the rest of the year pretending to himself that the month did not exist.

But Rhea had been left alone to guide this troubled land (he had left her alone to guide it unaided), and quiet contemplation had not been capable of providing her solace. Sometime after the war had been won—Seteth had been unable to pin down the exact year; it had been necessary to dispose of many of the texts dating back to that time, and Rhea no longer remembered which year had seen the first festival—the Goddess’s Rite of Rebirth had bene instituted, and turned the monastery into a buzzing hive of activity and visitors, all throughout the month.

On a normal year, the security concerns would have been enough to put Seteth’s teeth on edge. This year, the Western Church had chosen to attack the very foundation of their faith, and the Goddess’s Rite of Rebirth would provide an ideal opportunity for them to attack the monastery itself. Neither he nor Rhea particularly wanted guards posted around the Goddess Tower while they were locked away inside, especially not now that Flayn was with them, as well. They were still trying to determine just what they could bear.

(This was not how Seteth had wished for Flayn to experience the Rite, especially not her _first _experience of it. This whole Rite was… It was very easy for it to turn into a party. The first time Seteth had watched it turn into a party, he could not easily describe the emotions that had ignited in his chest. He was beyond shock, beyond fury. He couldn’t speak.

But they didn’t _know_. This was the price by which Rhea had bought peace for their family, the price that ensured they would not be hounded to the ends of the earth for every drop of blood and inch of bone. You cannot blame someone for what they do not know. To the faithful, this was a time of hope. Prayers for the Goddess’s return turned to celebrations surrounding their hope. When Seteth thought about it in such a light, all of this was almost touching. Almost.

Perhaps Flayn would be able to find enjoyment in the celebrations. She had been born many years after the calamity, so that, while she knew what this month represented, it did not spark the same instinctive feelings of loss and fear and rage as it did in her elders. And she had always had a gift for finding the sweet among the bitter. Seteth hoped the month would go smoothly, for her sake, if none other.)

Only a few months in, and this year had already been the most taxing Seteth had experienced since coming to the monastery. Even the first year, when he had still been striving to come to grips with the breadth of his new duties and was still struggling to earn the respect of all those he now oversaw (many of whom were less than thrilled that a complete stranger had been given seniority over them), could not compare. Manuela had developed a sort of game she liked to play whenever he had to visit her for a migraine cure: let’s see how many guesses we can have at why Seteth’s _really _visiting us, and let’s see how ridiculous and outlandish we can make those guesses. (She was bored, obviously. The issue was that Seteth was in _no _mood to humor her boredom when he came to her in such a state.)

Something else was becoming a recurring experience, when Seteth came down with migraines.

“Again?” he asked, when he caught sight of a pasty-faced Melusine standing outside of the infirmary’s door.

She said nothing; getting words out of her when she was in such a state was like pulling teeth. But she nodded silently, eyes flicking to the shut door.

Seteth could almost smile, if not for the fact that such a gesture would have sent his head spinning anew. She never did go somewhere without having first been invited, did she? “At this point, I do not think it too strange to assume that Manuela is simply ignoring you.”

It _was _strange, though, the sort of fellow-feeling that could be brought into the world at the crossroads of shared pain. All that fellow-feeling vanished the moment the pain subsided and he was fit to return to his post, but as long it existed, it was _there_, and how natural it felt was… strange.

(Not as strange as making someone who had so little experience of the monastery’s layout one of the people in charge of security. She would have been better off guarding a coffin. She would certainly have been more _useful _that way.)

“She’s not there,” Melusine said flatly. “I was waiting for her to return.”

“Being quieter than usual, I suppose.” Seteth stepped past her to the door, raping sharply on it with his knuckles. “Manuela?” he called out sharply. “Manuela, this is no time to—“

The door had not been locked, and as it turned out, had not been left entirely shut. It swung in slightly, a thin shaft of multi-colored light spilling out onto the hallway floor.

No one who stepped into this room expected the infirmary to be as large as it was. The architecture of this part of the second floor was not what people expected, in general. It could hide large, open spaces where the uninitiated would never expect to find them. The infirmary was one such place. It fit some twenty beds, as well as an open workspace close to the door. Manuela’s quarters were adjacent to the infirmary, and Seteth would always give her this much—she took her duties seriously enough that she would oversee the infirmary even when hungover.

This morning, the infirmary stood completely empty. None of the beds were filled; the light filtering through the stained glass windows illuminated neatly-arranged sheets and pillows. There was no sign of Manuela, nor any of the monks whose duties that day might be to serve as her assistants. Even Manuela’s medical instruments had been put away, and there was no clutter on her desk.

The door to Manuela’s quarters hung slightly ajar; shadow crept out from under it. A quick look inside revealed a space considerably less neat and organized than the infirmary, and try as he might (he would have loved to have managed it), Seteth couldn’t ignore the stale, sour odor that had come up to greet him in Manuela’s place. This place was, it turned out, empty as well.

As he went to shut the door, Seteth could feel eyes on his back. He sighed. “Yes, I admit it, you were right. She is not here.”

For whatever reason, Melusine seemed to have given up on getting an invitation—most likely, she just wanted somewhere to sit down; she certainly _looked _somewhat dizzy—and had come into the infirmary behind him. While Seteth went to sit down at Manuela’s desk, she made a quick, straight path over to the medicine cabinet.

“I cannot imagine where else she would be at this time of the morning,” Seteth muttered, more to himself than to Melusine. A few jolts of pain shot down his neck, and he resisted the urge to try to rub the tension away with his hand. “I have never known her to grace the Dining Hall for breakfast any earlier in the morning than around half past nine.” Then again, considering what month it was, given the increased concerns from the past few years, she might have vacated the infirmary for entirely different reasons. “You haven’t heard of any attacks in the monastery today, have you?” He hadn’t thought to check if Rhea was in her office before coming here. He hadn’t checked to see where _Flayn _was. “I must—“

“I know how the recipe to the migraine cure Manuela makes for us.”

Those words managed to stop Seteth dead in his tracks.

“You know how to mix the recipe.” He turned and frowned deeply at her. Some questions were better left to times when his head didn’t feel like it was about to fall off of his neck. Some questions absolutely would not wait. “How?”

“My father,” Melusine said simply.

And that… would just about explain it, yes. Even before Jeralt had resurfaced, Seteth had heard tales of the man, both of his talents on the battlefield, and his behavior off of it. Jeralt was a bit of a legend. He lived up to his legend.

Then, Seteth thought back to all of the times he had found Melusine standing outside of the infirmary door, and suddenly, he had a new question.

“Melusine, if you know the recipe, why do you keep coming _here _instead of mixing it yourself?”

Seteth would admit that it was difficult to pick out emotions from the mask that was her face, but he recognized wariness readily enough. “The handbook you gave me says white verona oil is a restricted substance,” she pointed out, eyes darting all over his face.

It took Seteth a few moments to make the connection between that fact and memory. When memory pushed up past the fog currently shrouding his mind, he sighed tiredly. “That would be because, in large quantities, white verona oil possesses certain mood-altering and hallucinogenic properties. Something _I _discovered around five years ago, after happening across a couple of students who _had _ingested white verona oil in large quantities.”

How many hours had it been before they were fit to be lectured and disciplined? Had it been five, or six? However long it had been, Seteth recalled quite clearly that until they came back to themselves, they had been quite incapable of being worried about the consequences of being found in such a state on monastery grounds. Actually, they’d been quite incapable of being worried about _anything_.

That rule had been instituted for a _reason_. To bend it simply to suit his own convenience would have been rank hypocrisy.

Visions of the mountains of paperwork slowly building up on his desk danced through Seteth’s head.

And come to think of it, regular class might not have been in session, but Melusine was holding sword practice in the training grounds this afternoon, wasn’t she?

“In my capacity as advisor to the archbishop, I temporarily waive the restriction on the use of white verona oil.” And expediency had won out. He wondered if this would be the last time. “With my permission, you may make use of it. So _please_, if you know how to brew that tonic, do so now.”

Melusine needed no further encouragement. She went straight to the medicine cabinet, and then to the small, wood-burning stove Manuela used for medicines that needed to be cooked in order to be effective. In this case, the white verona oil and the other ingredients in her migraine cure could technically be taken with water, or even undiluted, but they were significantly more palatable when mixed into a strong tea. At this point, Seteth might have forced the tonic down his throat without anything to dilute it, but either Melusine’s migraine wasn’t quite severe enough to warrant that sort of impatience, or she couldn’t stand the pure taste of the tonic no matter what her head felt like.

The water would take some time to come to a boil; Manuela’s stove was small, and took time to grow hot. Seteth saw no point to rising from his seat at Manuela’s desk; at least sat down, he didn’t have to worry about falling over. White he was waiting, he might as well try to get the answer to a question that had been playing at the back of his mind for some time now. Among others.

“Melusine…” This might have been too personal to ask. It was not a security concern, and whatever fellow-feeling Seteth experienced when they both came down with migraines at the same time, they did not have the sort of relationship that unambiguously allowed him to ask such a question. And yet… “You seem to come down with migraines quite often. Do you know the cause?”

She was, after all, a member of the faculty, and since becoming such, Seteth would admit he could find no fault with her performance. Her students’ progress was proceeding apace, and he had caught her in the library late at night more than once, poring over the reference texts—she was _trying _to teach her students as best she could. She was a member of the faculty, however questionable her appointment might have been, and that entitled her to a certain level of care.

Still hovering over the stove, Melusine shrugged. “There are a lot of people, here,” she said. “There are a lot of things going on at once. I can’t focus on all of it at once.”

“That…” Seteth frowned. Enbarr, by itself, had never given him migraines; there had to be a specific stressor to trigger it. “That does not make a great deal of sense.”

Melusine shrugged again. “It makes little sense to me that everyone else can be so content with it. It is what it is.”

After a few minutes more, the water had come to a boil. Melusine quickly mixed the ingredients for the tonic into the water, before going for a box of tea leaves. The powerful scent of peppermint soon filled the air; Seteth’s stomach turned, but that would certainly mask the taste of the tonic.

“Thank you,” he murmured, when a plain white teacup drifted into his field of vision. While he took the first sip of tea—and wished he had given it some time to cool; now he had a pounding head _and _a burned tongue—Melusine went and sat down on the edge of one of the beds on the first row, nursing her own teacup.

It would take some time for the tonic to take effect, even after he had drunk his fill. Better to stay somewhere quite until the pain finally started to ebb.

Quiet.

Perhaps, now that Flayn was with them, there would be something other than silence when the three of them took to the Goddess Tower on the day of the Rite. Seteth thought he might like that.

The present silence was not to last much longer.

Slowly, laboriously, the hallway door creaked open. Seteth already knew what he was going to see before it came all the way open, and sure enough, Manuela, wan, disheveled, and scowling intensely, walked unsteadily past the threshold.

“That jerk,” she muttered, not seeming at first to notice that she wasn’t alone. “Why should _he _care that I can drink more than him? Of all the…”

“Perhaps he did not wish to have to carry you up a flight of stairs to return you to your room,” Seteth suggested sharply.

Manuela jumped and whirled around, wobbling dangerously in the process, but managing to keep her footing. Her eyes first fell upon Seteth. “What are you—“ Then, she spied Melusine perched on the foot of that bed. “What _are _you two doing here?”

Any lecture was going to have to wait until after the tonic had taken effect. “We came here seeking the aid of the infirmary master.” Sarcasm was all he could reach for, and actually find. “Alas, the infirmary master was not here. Therefore, we must needs help ourselves.”

“What, migraines again?” Finally, the odor of peppermint hanging in the air reached Manuela’s nose. Her eyes drifted to the stove. “Have you two been in my medicine cabinet?” She laughed under her breath, drunk-dull, disappointment-dull eyes brightening slightly. “Why, Seteth, I would never have expected that from you. I ought to report you both.”

“If you report us,” Melusine spoke up, for the first time since Manuela had entered the infirmary, “does that mean we should pour out the tea?”

For the rest of his life, Seteth would be unable to tell if the question had been meant in earnest or not. Whatever the answer, the question had done the trick. Manuela threw up her hands and flopped down heavily on the edge of one of the vacant beds. “I get your point. _Please_, if you have any left, I want some.”

Seteth shook his head—and the gesture didn’t hurt quite as much as it would have half an hour ago—as Melusine got up to pour Manuela a cup of the tonic-laced tea. It would have served her right to have had nothing until she got up from that bed and poured a cup herself. But perhaps growing up around a habitual drunkard had left Melusine more charitably inclined.

Manuela sat up a little straighter, smiling weakly as Melusine handed off a cup. “Oh, thanks.” She snorted into her teacup. “At least somebody around here is nice to me.” But as Melusine retrieved her cup and returned to her previous seat, Manuela narrowed her eyes at her, a look of intense suspicion coming over her face. “Hey, you _are _following my advice, aren’t you?”

Melusine made a “mm-hmm” noise into her teacup.

That ‘mm-hmm’ did not fill Seteth with confidence, though he’d admit he didn’t presently know what they were talking about. Manuela _certainly _knew what they were talking about, and it _certainly _didn’t fill her with confidence. “I mean it,” she pressed. “If your head starts to hurt, you need to come to _me_. You can’t just try to suffer through it and hope it goes away; that never works.”

Melusine nodded her head, though she never looked up from her teacup. “Okay.”

That ‘okay’ wouldn’t have satisfied Seteth if it was Flayn saying it (and he had not missed the irony), and he suspected it wouldn’t have satisfied Manuela if she wasn’t as hungover as she was. But the circumstances saved Melusine from any further prodding questions; Manuela was clearly far more interested in draining her teacup and getting closer to a point where her head wasn’t screaming at her.

As Seteth’s head began slowly to clear, something else that had been bothering him for a while came to mind, and he looked to Melusine, frowning.

There was something vaguely familiar about her appearance. He couldn’t place what it was. He knew full well that they had never met before the day when Jeralt returned to the monastery; Jeralt had stayed well clear of Garreg Mach in his twenty-one years of silence. There was no chance that they had ever met before that day, and as best as Seteth could determine, Jeralt had no family in the monastery, so there were no relatives running around for Seteth to half-remember—that could not have been the origin of this sense of familiarity. But still, there was something, just something, about her appearance that made Seteth feel as if he ought to know her.

He did not know from whence this feeling had originated, and it bothered him.

Manuela’s low chuckle drew him from his reverie. The moment Seteth looked to her, she looked to Melusine, eyebrow raised and lip twitching. “Well, Seteth, are you sure you don’t have something you want to _say _to her?” she asked, sing-song.

Melusine looked up from her teacup, looking between the two of them with frank confusion. “What?”

_“Manuela!_”

The end result of that was that nearly every guard on the second floor came running at the sound of his shout, Rhea trailing behind them. Melusine somehow managed to glide out without anyone realizing it, and Manuela deflected any attention that might have been sent her way with a level of skill no one would have expected from someone as hungover as she had been not half an hour ago, let alone Seteth, chortling all the while.

The guards were eventually placated. Eventually. To a man, they all looked at him like he’d sprouted a second head as they filed out. That left Rhea, who was peering at him like she couldn’t decide which angle to attack from first, an expression that was bringing back vivid memories from when they were both much shorter, probably because she hadn’t looked at him in quite that way _since _they were both much shorter.

Once Manuela had vanished from sight, Seteth said, almost imploringly, “Please don’t ask; I have so much work to do, and no desire to recount Manuela’s flights of fancy.”

Rhea’s mouth wobbled like she was trying not to laugh. “Later, then.”

-0-0-0-

And many months later, Seteth would realize just why it was Melusine looked familiar to him.

She looked just like Rhea.

But by then, the fact that she looked just like Rhea was the least of his worries.

**Author's Note:**

> While it's clear Doylistically that the Knights and the faculty all call her 'Professor' to cover for the fact that you can give your avatar any name you please, I can't think of any Watsonian reason for them to be calling her that. Hence Seteth and Manuela referring to Melusine by name.


End file.
